Overview articles

Our roads are unsafe. A large number of the cars on our roads are inefficient, polluting, and even dangerous to drive. Many go uninspected, as people thumb their noses at the law, and many more are cheap cars that were damaged and repaired badly, bought secondhand on the gray market. On top of everything else,…

International reports suggest that the Middle East is currently the world’s second fastest growing region in private wealth, trailing only Asia. According to a Global Wealth 2017 report published in June by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), an international management consulting firm, the private wealth segment picked up momentum globally in 2016, but with visible regional…

Property developers with projects in and immediately around Beirut are in trouble. In late November, Massaad Fares – president of REAL, Lebanon’s syndicate for real estate brokers and consultants – explains that a years-long sales slump at the highest end of the market is having a wider economic impact. Developers with too much exposure to…

When compared with the banking sector and the initiatives taken by Banque du Liban (BDL), the year was unnervingly quiet for the country’s insurance industry. Preliminary information on the performance of insurance companies suggests that the 4 percent growth in gross premiums to $1.2 billion at the end of the third quarter was low when…

The year 2016 was a difficult one for Lebanon’s manufacturing and agriculture sectors. Exports have been one of the clearest indicators of the challenges the sectors have faced and, in general, of Lebanon’s depressed economy – largely due to the war in neighboring Syria, a conflict that has cut Lebanon off from its larger trading…